Quality of life (QOL) is defined by the World Health Organization as "an individual's perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns".
Development economics is a branch of economics that deals with economic aspects of the development process in low- and middle- income countries. Its focus is not only on methods of promoting economic development, economic growth and structural change but also on improving the potential for the mass of the population, for example, through health, education and workplace conditions, whether through public or private channels.
Economic inequality is an umbrella term for a) income inequality or distribution of income, b) wealth inequality or distribution of wealth, and c) consumption inequality. Each of these can be measured between two or more nations, within a single nation, or between and within sub-populations.
Economic materialism can be described as either a personal attitude that attaches importance to acquiring and consuming material goods or as a logistical analysis of how physical resources are shaped into consumable products.
Bruno S. Frey is a Swiss economist and visiting professor for Political Economy at the University of Basel. Frey's research topics include Political economy and Happiness economics, with his published work including concepts derived from Psychology, Sociology, Jurisprudence, History, Arts, and Theology.
Juliet B. Schor is an American economist and Sociology Professor at Boston College. She has studied trends in working time, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic inequality, and concerns about climate change in the environment. From 2010 to 2017, she studied the sharing economy under a large research project funded by the MacArthur Foundation. She is currently working on a project titled "The Algorithmic Workplace" with a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Peter Richard Grenville Layard, Baron Layard FBA is a British labour economist, co-director of the Community Wellbeing programme at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, and co-editor of the World Happiness Report. Layard is an economist who wants public policy to be targeted at the wellbeing of the people. To this end he has written 6 books and some 40 articles.
The capability approach is a normative approach to human welfare that concentrates on the actual capability of persons to achieve lives they value rather than solely having a right or freedom to do so. It was conceived in the 1980s as an alternative approach to welfare economics.
The economics of happiness or happiness economics is the theoretical, qualitative and quantitative study of happiness and quality of life, including positive and negative affects, well-being, life satisfaction and related concepts – typically tying economics more closely than usual with other social sciences, like sociology and psychology, as well as physical health. It typically treats subjective happiness-related measures, as well as more objective quality of life indices, rather than wealth, income or profit, as something to be maximized.
Robert Zachary Lawrence is a South Africa-born American economist and Albert L. Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment at John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The Easterlin paradox is a finding in happiness economics formulated in 1974 by Richard Easterlin, then professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and the first economist to study happiness data. The paradox states that at a point in time happiness varies directly with income both among and within nations, but over time happiness does not trend upward as income continues to grow: while people on higher incomes are typically happier than their lower-income counterparts at a given point in time, higher incomes don't produce greater happiness over time. One explanation is that my happiness depends on a comparison between my income and my perceptions of the average standard of living. If everyone's income increases, my increased income gives a short boost to my happiness, since I do not realize that the average standard of living has gone up. Some time later, I realize that the average standard of living has also gone up, so the happiness boost produced by my increased income disappears. It is the contradiction between the point-of-time and time series findings that is the root of the paradox: while there is a correlation at a fixed point, there is no trend over multiple points. That is, in the short run, everyone perceives increases in income to be correlated with happiness and tries to increase their incomes. However, in the long run, this proves to be an illusion, since everyone's efforts to raise standards of living lead to increasing averages, leaving everyone in the same place in terms of relative income. Various theories have been advanced to explain the paradox, but the paradox itself is solely an empirical generalization. The existence of the paradox has been strongly disputed by other researchers.
Nancy Birdsall is an American economist, the founding president of the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, DC, USA, and former executive vice-president of the Inter-American Development Bank.
Lars Osberg has been a member of the Economics Department at Dalhousie University since 1977. He also worked for a brief period at the University of Western Ontario. He is well known internationally for his contributions in the field of economics. His major research interests are the measurement and determinants of inequality, social exclusion and poverty, measurement of economic well-being, leisure co-ordination and economic well-being, time use and economic development, economic insecurity.
Nora Lustig is the Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and the Director of the CEQ Institute at Tulane University, and a non-resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue.
Betsey Ayer Stevenson is an economist and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Additionally, she is a fellow of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and servers on the board of the American Economic Association. The Obama Administration announced her appointment as a Member of the Council of Economic Advisers, a post she served from 2013 through 2015. She previously served as Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor under Secretary Hilda Solis from 2010 to 2011. Previously, she was an assistant professor of Business and Public Policy, at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Med Jones is an American economist. He is the president of International Institute of Management, a U.S. based research organization. His work at the institute focuses on economic, investment, and business strategies.
The Department of International Development (DID), formerly known as King's International Development Institution, is an inter-disciplinary development department located within the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy in the School of Global Affairs at King's College London. DID was launched in 2013 with a focus on the phenomena faced by middle-income developing countries. DID is a young, innovative, and contemporary development studies department that is the first research centre in the UK that mixes development studies and emerging markets. Its research revolves around development theory, political economy, economics, business, management, geography, and social policy.
Clair Brown is an American economist who is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. Brown is a past Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations (IRLE) at UC Berkeley. Brown has published research on many aspects of how economies function, including high-tech industries, development engineering, the standard of living, wage determination, poverty, and unemployment.
John F. Helliwell is a Canadian economist, professor emeritus of Economics at the University of British Columbia. senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and co-director of the CIFAR Programme on Social Interactions, Identity, and Well-Being; Board Director of the International Positive Psychology Association, and editor of the World Happiness Report.
Economic anxiety, also referred to as economic insecurity, is the state of concern about the future of one's economic prospects, owing to low economic security. Economic anxiety can increase due to loss of household income or decreased purchasing power, causing affected individuals to self-report having more issues with societal structure and a lower quality of life. Anxiety occurs when the idea of a situation is regarded as highly threatening, unpleasant and doubtful, motivating individuals to stay away from insecurity by creating an environment that is safe in order to protect themselves and their families from threatening groups and events.
